Not Proud To Be An American

There are no words adequate right now. No topic that feels appropriate. We are a country at war. And after everything we’ve been through, there are still enough people who believe that some lives are worth less. That people shouldn’t have autonomy over their own bodies, or be comfortable in their own skin if they don’t fit a particular mold. That poverty is a choice and that stricter gun regulations would take away constitutional rights.

For all the songs and bumper stickers yelling proud to be American, that just isn’t me. I’m not proud of the systems we’ve continued to uphold. Despite almost daily overwhelming examples of their brokenness. Despite more mass shootings this year than days, and rising suicide rates in children. Or our consumption habits that prove we value convenience over our future.

We claim to be compassionate, and that we care about our all our fellow humans equally. We might even write a check, feeling proud of what a good person we are. Then we walk home, refusing to make eye contact as we pass the homeless person huddled on the street. We don’t want to even acknowledge their existence and we tell ourselves they would have only used the money for drugs anyway. We pretend that not helping them is more helpful to their future.

The system doesn’t start all of us at the same place. The world doesn’t present the same privilege and opportunities equally to everyone. It does matter where you were born, and which neighborhood you grew up in. Decades ago, our neighborhoods were zoned to keep the poor people in poor neighborhoods. Tax dollars hard at work. To make sure the people with the deepest pockets reaped the most benefits. And so that empty pockets stayed empty.

We claim that all people are welcome in church. Then we use religion to systematically tear people apart for being who they are. We use religion to strip other humans of their rights to health care because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. We hide behind our good intentions and bible verses while we politely tell people that the way they exist is wrong. Just because they are different from than the way we believe is the right way to live.

But of course, we’re good people. We donate to charity and volunteer at the local community center. We surprise people in our lives with little gifts in the mail and make phone calls for every birthday. All you have to do is look at our calendars and you’ll see how often we do nice things for others. And then we smile smugly to ourselves, satisfied that our calendars show that we give more of our time and money than you do.

We scream about our constitutional rights and how we need to protect them. We might even claim that human rights are important to us. But we really just mean that our rights are important to us. Because it’s more comfortable when we’re comfortable. And we’re more comfortable when the laws are in line with our personal beliefs. Truly, how lucky for you if you’re still comfortable right now. That’s privilege.

I don’t know if there are any written words held on a higher pedestal in this country than the Bible or the Constitution. We like to think of them as the words that began everything. But the Bible wasn’t written at the beginning of time. The stories in it had to come first. So someone could write about them. And our constitution wasn’t written at the beginning of our country. People had to live here first. And they did. Long before the ones who wrote the rules.

The things about written words is that you can edit them with time. And we’ve done so, heavily, with both these creations. We’ve added amendments to our Constitution and we’ve published countless translations of the Bible. We’ve edited whenever necessary to fit our agendas. Because we all know that words can be changed. And beliefs can be more flexible than we like to admit.

Words can make us comfortable. Or they can make us more uncomfortable that we’d like to admit. Even our own.